Contra Costa County Community Info Pages

On Father’s Day I put together “posts” 17 through 27 in our Hunger Blogathon, in the form of the Community Info pages for Contra Costa County.

OK, granted there’s a little sleight of hand here, insofar as I want to further develop these pages going forward, so some of them are pretty primitive at this point.  Meantime, there should be anoher ten or so such pages coming out that will round out our Community pages for Alameda County.  But until we bake those half baked pages some more and add their Alameda County equivalents, this is Post 28 in our Hunger Marathon.

Stay tuned.

Oakland Average Home Prices

Here are the average prices for a single family residential home of all types (including detached, condos, etc.) for September, broken down by zip code. We’ve also included the appreciation in the average price since the same time last year:

Oakland Crime Data

The City of Oakland publishes crime watch data on the City’s web site. You should start by reading the disclaimer and go from there. You can check by type of crime, by date range, and specific neighborhoods.

For some background on the application, see this SFGate Article.

Jenn Shreve’s Salon article poses the critical question, “What good is a site that lets Oakland, Calif., residents check on neighborhood crime stats if the people in those neighborhoods aren’t online?” Shreve goes on to interview Barry Kriberg, president of the National Council on Crime Prevention: “Rather than help neighborhood groups attack crime problems, Kriberg says the site will probably prove most useful to people deciding where (and where not) to buy homes or to insurers looking for an excuse to raise rates.”

Well, my own take on this is that I never met an insurer who needed an excuse to raise rates. As for folks being able to do research before buying a home, I see that as pretty much a good thing. One of the issues I’ve found in the other market I write about, Sacramento, is that often we get many folks from out of town finding the most inexpensive houses in inventory, and sure enough, those homes are located in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Of course, that’s a mistake that any beginner to the area can make, but the more people get interested in a neighborhood, the more issues like quiet and safety become important to find out about.

Fremont’s Mission Peak

There’s a nice shot of Mission Peak on Alison Chaiken’s Mission Peak hiking page.

Alison is shown here enjoying her tanks.

Fremont Community Profile Page

I just did a new community profile page for Fremont.

Please feel free to add comments if there are good sites to which I should be linking from that page, or other good Fremont resources I should be blogging about. Contributors welcome.

Alameda County Profile Page

I’ve put up a general community profile for Alameda County.

To tell you the truth, it’s hard to say anything especially intelligent at the county level. Contra Costa County seemed to get all the good state and national parks, for example. What’s up with that?

But if there’s something unintelligent to be said, on the other hand, count on me to plunge ahead boldly.

Oakland Community Profile

I’ve started work on several community profile pages. The fist is the Oakland City Profile. I’d actually planned to break apart the various topics — government, recreation, etc. — but that and school information can wait for a later draft.

One of the neatest things I bumped into as I was writing the Oakland profile was Jerry Brown’s blog. Mayor Brown’s blog is actually quite good, I thought, similar in quality to many progressive journalists I follow (I’m a fan of Alternet).